


here all things scream silently

by Trekkele



Series: VaYehi [2]
Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Antisemitism, Famine - Freeform, Gen, Holocaust Mention, Jewish James T. Kirk, POV First Person, Racism, Tarsus IV, and nothing is very detailed but, author is jewish, evrything is glossed over, genocide mention, this is a tarsus iv story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-30
Updated: 2019-01-30
Packaged: 2019-10-19 12:40:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17601548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trekkele/pseuds/Trekkele
Summary: Jim Kirk on Tarsus."It started quietly, like most things do. By the time it's done, it will be screaming in your footsteps against polished tile, in your blood, in your pulse. "Spiritual Prequel to "Tefillot", but should be read after.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> i kept thinking about switching it back to third person POV but this is how i was writing it so it stayed.  
> Could be read as a prequel to Tefillot, technically that's what it started as.
> 
> Please tell me if i missed a necessary tag. 
> 
> Holocaust Remembrance day was this sunday, Jan 27. I always wondered if they said "Never Again" after the crusades, or the cossacks, or the programs or the blood libels or the conquest of yerushalayim. I'm lucky enough to live in a time where when we say "Never Again", there is a chance it may be true.
> 
> But there will always be men like this.

It started quietly, like all things do. Like the spring, that was late this year, Uncle Thom looking over his shoulder as he checked the garden, Aunt Lisa planting seeds that would never see the sun.

Like the sunrise. Like the sunset. Like death, you supposed, but for you death has always been loud and incessant and screaming in your ear, in your pulse, in your blood. You were born in death. And you have never been very silent.

It started quietly, like most things do. By the time it's done, it will be screaming in your footsteps against polished tile, in your blood, in your pulse. 

The sky on Tarsus isn't blue. Some days you wish it was, but it isn't. It is the most violent purple you have ever seen, peach clouds of heavy water a constant herd across the endless sky. At sunset it burns a red you've grown to love, and at sunrise it burns a blue your uncle swears ain't found on Earth except in the dilithium chambers of a starship and the irises of your eyes. You've grown to love sunrise too.

Spring was supposed to start sprouting two weeks ago and there are whispers in places there shouldn't be, in places you can't see, and watching your Uncle wind the leather of his tefillin straps around his arms every morning stops feeling safe now and starts feeling dangerous in silence, heavy, because he's not the only one who does so but they've all stopped doing it together. 

(In a few months you'll wind them slowly off a corpse you once new and pretend the tears you can't cry are because of dehydration and not the overwhelming screams of _how dare you how dare you how dare you_ you've directed at the sky you think might be G-d, at the black holes you think might be angels, great and terrible and barely understood.) 

It's two more weeks of whispers and hunger and tired smiles where there are none before the round ups start. 

But no one calls them that. It's voluntary re-placement - as if people aren't abandoning their entire lives and homes and the futures they've built on bricks and clay and the purple-blackened soil they worshiped with seeds and water and time. As if they aren't trusting a madman. 

But then, he wasn't mad yet. 

You see a pattern. So does everyone else. Everyone left is human.

Everyone gone wasn't.

(It doesn't stop there. But this is where it starts.) 

The Vulcans disappear one night, and when you find them again they'll be huddled in a cave with 3.45 ration bars left buried in their robes and you'll take the children but leave the parents to their healing sleep, knowing it's their only chance. They barely make it. No one else does.

 

It happens quietly. Silently. So no one bothers screaming. Those that do find their voices are gone, slowly given away as plans they didn't bother seeing passed them by.

You start running when they come and you do not look back.

Not for gunshots. Or the screams you don't hear. Or the mercy they offer you, blue eyed, blond haired, you. Only you. 

It's all a mistake anyway.

 

You push the children before you, collect them in dusty fields and burnt trees and rivers turnt yellow with blood. You do not pray.

 

You do not scream.

 

There are no strange birds left, walking on curved claws and singing with tongues better suited for silence, there are no winding antelopes with green horns and soft hooves and eyes that almost understand.

 

There are children.

 

And there is silence.

 

Thick, unending, blackened nights with sunrise's that burn blue and you hate the sun, hate the moons hanging low and close, but you hate the purple sky the most.

You love sunset. Sunset does not lie about what lives beneath her. Red, and red, and red. Burning above and below and the soil will never grow more than white bones soaked with the screams that no one ever had time to listen to. 

There are children, and they run, and they live, and you are captured, once and twice and again and again and still you run. They are bad at this game, you suppose. Or perhaps you are simply good at running.

 

(You call it a game. You call it a challenge. You do not call it what it is.)

 

One time they are not, or you are not, and you do not care, because your screams are clawing at your throat and the madman is right. there. 

And there is mercy, beneath the contempt in his eyes. 

“You should not have been on the list.” He says. “you are not like those unworthy souls you live ( _run_ ) with” he says.

 

He knows nothing.

 

And you tell him this, on your knees, head higher than it has any right to be. You tell him this, this savior, this kindness, this ancient blackened thing you thought your people buried eons ago, on a different battlefield and a different graveyard and a different massacre. 

They say time heals all. Some things should not be allowed to heal.

 

“My name,” you say, “is James Tiberius Kirk.”

You do not tell him the grandfather you are named after, a generation and a generation and a generation ago has numbers creeping up his arm very much like the ones he's branded in your side. 

You do not tell him that a generation before that people like him burnt a city to the ground, and before that they ripped children from living arms and before that they threw slaves from the ships and before that, before that, _before that_.

 

You do not tell him there will always be people like him.

“I am Jewish.” you say, and you cannot scream, but you wish you could, you wish you could brand this to your soul and have the world acknowledge this. But you suppose he already has.  “My mother is Jewish. I was born a Jew. And I will die a Jew.”

 

You have lived your life in a constant forward motion, like a car off a cliff, a fist midair, a tidal wave that burns all it touches. 

You do not want to die.

 

But there is mercy in his eyes, this savior, this father, this mentor who taught you more about death then anything, and you do not want his _Mercy_.  

It does not come cheap.

 

But your death is. And it is worth the anger and contempt and rage that he throws at you and you wonder how this is just, that of all the screams this planet holds his seem to be the loudest.

 

In the coming weeks you will unwind leather and ancient parchment from a corpse you once knew and you will hear his screams echoing in your ears for a long time.

 

But the dead do not scream. They do not offer you mercy. You bury them on Tarsus, and you hope God will listen, because your ears are soaked in blood and you cannot.


	2. Chapter 2

It starts silently, like most things do. It ends in screams and blood and bright crisp uniforms and polished boots on polished tiles and he's always known anger could burn this bright but he hadn't realized everything else could too.

 

The first time he puts his uncle's tefillin on its out of spite. He doesn't think he deserves this. The fifth, sixth, time is out of a misplaced sense of duty. By the time he's been putting them on for a year it's out of some kind of respect. 

 

Not for G-d. Not yet. 

 

(Maybe not ever, because he's lived his life in a constant state of moving forward and all G-d has ever done is keep up.)

 

For his uncle, soft spoken and kind and stronger than a botanist had any right to be. For his aunt, backlit by a thousand candles every Friday and a covered crown for no reason other than she knew it made her own mother smile. For centuries of people who never got the chance. 

 

So he buries his own shame behind broken ribs and black eyes but he is always up before the dawn and the silent whisper of leather straps against his skin is some form of absolution, some form of a forgiveness he does not deserve and should not ask for. 

 

He buries his own death behind closed doors and a white smile and he pretends it's just a thing, just a prayer, and not something he's bled for. 

 

He can't abandon it now. 

 

It starts silently. A minyan that no longer meets, a garden that turns to dust, a child on his knees. 

 

It ends silently as well. But the blood in his ears and lungs and heart screams. 

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Baba Yar, by Yevgeni Yevtushenko. I strongly recommend you read it.
> 
> http://remember.org/witness/babiyar


End file.
